The Killing Blade

ElSemi has been working on emulating the protection in “The Killing Blade” a game running on the PGM platform, and I’ve been porting his findings into MAME.

 

The Killing Blade was always a very mysterious game, near impossible to find any information on the only real information lay in the depths of the Taiwanese section of the old IGS site with only 2 tiny screenshots which weren’t even clear enough to determine what type of game it was.

 

Anyway, so that any potential buyers of the game actually know what they’ll be getting I’ve decided to take a few snaps of it. It’s a Samurai Shodown style game, quite bloody, with some nice effects. It’s a tag game like some of the CPS2 titles, but in this case both characters share a single energy bar. The characters and moves are more interesting than in a lot of similar titles, although the animation and quality of some of the graphics lets the game down a bit.

 

The game may not work 100% correctly yet as there are still some very suspicious things going on with the protection and more than a few things that don’t make much sense yet.

 

I’ve also added sprite zooming to the PGM driver, although this has slowed it down quite a bit for now. I may re-optimize it later, the PGM sprite system is messy to support.

 

Before anybody asks, No, I don’t plan on looking at the newer titles or porting ElSemi’s KOV2 work to MAME. I feel it’s more important to get the older IGS titles sorted out before even thinking of looking at the newer ones like Martial Masters, Knights of Valor 2, DoDonPachi 2 etc.

 

Note, these screenshots have been resized to look better on a standard display because PGM uses a strange 448×224 resolution.

Note 2, this is really ElSemi’s WIP as porting his code to MAME is trivial compared to figuring it out in the first place.

 

Anyway, now everybody has a pretty good idea what it looks like.

>> Visit Haze's site to see the pictures.

BASin release 13a by Paul Dunn (2,713,156 bytes)

Not strictly an emulator, but a Spectrum BASIC Development environment, both 48K and 128K! It saves to.tap and.tzx files, so programs created in BASin can be run on emulators. [15/04/06] 

>> Get it HERE.

MAME Plus! 0.105u1 2006-04-14

 

* removed useless changes to official source that only differ in whitespaces/comments

* fixed broken PSX CPU in official v0.105u1

* fixed kf2k3upl reset when booting for ICC build

* some improvements to cps1 hacks [Creamymami]

* removed kodb z80 patch [FBA]

* fixed 3rd Player 'Button3/Insert coin' in wof hacks:

** wofh, wofha: 3P 'Insert Coin' (default:'7') for special attack; use 'Service' (default:'9') to insert coin

** wof3js, wof3sj, wof3sja: insert coin and special attack share the same 3P 'Insert Coin'

** wofsjb: buggy. use 'Service' to insert coin for all players. 3P not yet playable

*please note: M68K DRC core is broken in this version. ASM core is no longer maintained, which causes CPS2 crashes. Use at your own risk.

>> MAMEplus! -> http://www3.emu-zone.org/host/mameplus/download.htm

>> MAME32qa -> http://mame32qa.classicgaming.gamespy.com/

Ubisoft officially dumps Starforce

Citing "complaints," the publisher ends its relationship with the copyright-protection provider.

Following several days of rumors, Ubisoft has officially confirmed that it will no longer use the controversial digital-rights software from Starforce. "Ubisoft has decided to use an alternative copy-protection system to Starforce for upcoming releases," said a rep for the company. The announcement means that Starforce software will not be included in Heroes of Might and Magic V, the publisher's much-anticipated forthcoming PC role-playing game.

Ubisoft's decision caps weeks of controversy surrounding Starforce. In mid-March, an employee of the Russian-German-Chinese-Cypriot company was accused of posting a link to a site where users could illegally download Stardock's space sim Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. Shortly, thereafter, Aspyr Media decided to sever its relationship with Starforce and remove its software from its forthcoming game, Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars.

Ubisoft's motivation for ending its agreement with Starforce was more personal. At the end of March, the company was slapped with a $5 million lawsuit by gamers who claimed that Starforce's DRM system compromised the security of their PCs. "We are currently investigating complaints about alleged problems with Starforce's software," said the Ubisoft rep.

Gamespot.com